An Elephant of One's Own

If you're a Hollywood director, you'll know that a "teacher" is someone who stalks about the timbered end of a classroom, firing off Socratic questions and pertinent facts, a tall ship in the centre of a small inland sea of rapt attention. Girls prop their chins on their hands and gaze adoringly at him ( sic ). Behind him, waves of untidy equations rise and fall on a seasick blackboard. At some point, this "teacher" may instruct students to rip up a book or stand on a desk: querulously or with alacrity, it shall be done . And of course, years later, he'll be remembered with a mixture of amused affection and reverence. This blameless, worthy soul, dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, will have "changed lives" almost in spite of himself. Friendship, maybe not so much, but influence, well, he's practically got the patent on it. I am not this "teacher". I don't know whether he really exists. Perhaps he does. I...

Toilet Graffitist He rasps the crap with crooked hands, Close to the cistern's swaddling bands; On the rim of the toilet bowl, he stands. The wrinkled turd beneath him crawls; He strains to daub the farthest walls, And, like a blundering dolt, he falls.

Onomatoplop! Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you. "Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?" You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be amo...

Being English, he would play the Tea card with care, using it carefully only a few times a day, in real emergencies. This, this having of a f*m*le head in one's lap, was such an emergency. He played the card, and managed to slide out from under her when she said Fine. The kettle went on. He was still young, a student, and still thought that life contained possibilities and important choices, and that not all doors necessarily concealed, for him, goats. Right now, in his college-supplied room in the "Annex", he thought there was such a choice, there, lounging on his bed. If he did and said the right things in the right order, there would be puppies. She would see to it that he would have puppies, and his whole life would be transformed. In order for this to happen, he supposed he would have to inspire "love", or something roughly in that semantic vicinity. He did not know how to do this. There was no set way of doing this, since his situation was absolutely uni...

I have never, that I recall, experienced anger on my own account (on others' account? sure, but that's a cheap thrill, overfished to the brink of banality by Hollywood and the entertainment industry). First-person anger is (alas?) inaccessible to me, since it is predicated on the belief that you have some rights, or that you deserve better than you've just been served. Those of us who were brought up to believe that we (unlike other people) have no rights cannot be angry. We can, however, experience rage. It works like this. Someone pisses you off. For example, they slap your bum . The instinctual part of you, the one that doesn't need permission to feel things, erupts in response. The emotion attempts, again instinctively (?), to enlist support from the cognitive area of your brain. It wants to feel "justified". In many people, esp. those of the "entitled" sort, the sense of justification is instantly forthcoming. The other has wronged you, and yo...

You won't get a novel out of me (or this). I did try. It was a long time ago - long enough for me to have been using a steampunk contraption called an "Amstrad PCW", with a two-tone screen, no hard disk, and 64K of memory - and I had this eccentric idea that to write a novel, you just sat down and hammered out at least 200 pages of facetiousness, packed with as many terrible puns as you could think of, all tenuously justified by a half-baked attempt at autobiography, in which the few real people you had actually known during the chosen period of your life were impatiently replaced with lifeless allegorical figures, whom you moved like chess pieces towards a contrived conclusion. It was an unlikeable abortion, as I realised almost as soon as I had typed the final full stop. I don't know if anyone other than me managed to read beyond the first two pages, but if they did, they must have wondered what the point of it was, and concluded that I was hard up, which I was, and...

"So the Swedes are at it again," said a man with straw hair and a parallelogram for a nose, "voting for a number of different political parties, including one that the Guardian doesn't like. There have been articles, comments, pundits and Punditssons, all stalking around this obscure tragedy, peering into the flames, trying to understand. I know no Swedish, yet happen to understand perfectly, free of charge, because like the Swedes, I am a yes man." "A yes man," he went on, lighting his moustache and waving away the proffered crumpet, "is a man who says yes while miserably dreaming the alluring no. A man for whom 'free choice' is an alibi rather than a motive, something you just invoke to get out of the fix of explaining. A man whose choices - because actually unfree, constrained to binary by a maritime git's bony legs round his neck - lead to diminished and dismal outcomes, the sort that garner distracted smirks, and the odd Irish ...

In later years he would wonder how close he’d been to death, that afternoon when, home early from school and to a Jerry Garcia soundtrack, he’d downed the full bottle of Gordon’s and three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, dappled by the fidgeting tree-shadows of a suburban bedroom. There were no explicit suicidal intentions behind Project Drink-Myself-into-a-Coma, but equally, as he remembered it, his adolescent consciousness was burdensome enough for its irreversible cessation to seem, at the time, a risk scarce worth examining and easily worth taking. Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a...

Can't remember who said it: it was in a YT video on l'affaire Peterson , and we even got "they're a part of me, like an organ of my body", or some such. Cute or cringe, you decide. Hearing this, I reflected it was time someone put out a compilation of 21st century Magical Thinking superstitions, of which this proprietary nature of personal pronouns could be one, along with, say, The Patriarchy, or the Male Gaze - you know, the one which causes things and people evilly ogled to burst into flame, crinkle, self-destruct, be objectified, and all the other Planet Krypton stuff those remarkable laser eyes get up to as soon as you let them off the hook. Is the proposed extension of the set of English pronouns achievable as a long-term goal? I would say yes, in principle, if restricted to a single additional set of non-gendered third person singular pronouns. However, I don't think it's either necessary or desirable, and I also don't think it will probably g...

I was never going to be a good guitarist. Tall people never are: the ultrafine motor coordination required for virtuoso musicianship requires the shorter sorta arms normally found attached to a shorter sorta torso. But I plodded gamely away at it, practising the scales and twanging my awkward way through Sor, Carulli, Tarrega, Bach, Bert Jansch, Stefan Grossman, Chet Atkins and all the usual suspects through my teens and twenties. In the process, partly out of frustration at not being able to get the fast runs right (esp in the Bach Chaconne), I found myself churning out bass lines, chord sequences and melodies, optimistically labelled "songs" (a handful even had lyrics), in accordance with the maxim "if you can't do, teach" (or in musical terminology, "if you can't play, write"). I authored perhaps three or four hundred of these, touting them around the various bands I was in. The response was always the same: "too difficult", presumably...

"Tell the truth - or at least don't lie," enjoins J Peterson, in his latest poetry collection  12 Elegies for the Mass Funeral of the Bleedin Obvious . I agree. Readers of this blog (that still-empty set) will have noticed I take this commandment rather seriously. I don't know what he finds to say as a gloss to his version of the age-old injunction (haven't bought the book, nor plan to) but if it was me, I'd probably find it useful to examine, one by one, all the ways in which people are tempted to lie and the (emotional) reasons they have for doing so. Also, as an addendum, the reasons why some of us are unable to tell the truth about certain painful things in our own experience, and, so as not to lie, have to settle for just keeping those things under wraps until we die. That too. One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language , viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your t...

My weekend? Nice of me to ask. Well, it was the weekend of the referendum, the weekend of me uploading some old poems to this blog, and the weekend Dr Randomercam did Grid Girls, with his usual combination of charisma (I don't envy him that, I never had any so we might as well be talking bobsleigh for all the skin I have in the game) and wordplay (something I actually have tried to be good at, but have so far mostly goofed at [but see below], and consequently do envy him: that title is to die for, or at least, to stub your toe on a chest of drawers for, twice). I mention the Grid Girls thing as a convenient segue into something that's been at the back of my mind for a while, viz.  beldades , though it's probably more suited to a treatment in Spanish on the other blog, which I might get around to in a few days. But here's the essence of it, for what it's worth. Light up and sit back: this might take about ten paragraphs to get through. About grid girls, I'm in...